I was thinking about how to make the Survivor Series meaningful, and I've come up with the following scenario

- There is one Survivor Series 5 on 5 match per year- Authority figuree on Raw and Smackdown picks the team captains, one face, on heel- Team Captain picks out their remaining four members, from either their own brand or the other brand- Whoever survives on the winning team advances to a match, preferably on Raw the next night, to determine who is the number one contender for the WWE or Universal Championship at the Royal Rumble

This is huge because being the number one contender at the Royal Rumble effectively allows you to bypass the Rumble match itself. The fact that each team captain is allowed to pick any superstar on Raw or Smackdown to be on their team allows for a number of interesting, unique matchups as well.

i'd personally like to see stipulations where ALL the brand roster can get behind off. I always loved the Bragging rights PPV, i like this smackdown vs raw competition, check out this video from SS05, this is what i want from a raw vs smackdown feud

so what kind of stipulations could a whole brand get behind of?, that is the question. Maybe first pick at the draft if we move the draft after SS, maybe whoever wins gets the rights to the MITB match/PPV, maybe whoever wins gets the cruiserweight division, idk

It has got nothing to do with stips. If you want to make Survivor Series important you have to make the match relevant to the storylines in a tangible way. Yes, stips help, but they're not the be-all end-all, and I think having stips like that locked on to the match would actually take away from the Survivor Series team elimination concept itself feeling important.

If I were them I would be using Survivor Series as a jumping off point to set up storylines that run through the Rumble or even though Mania. It should either be the end of something huge or the beginning of many important things. The thing in my fantasy booking that I'm most proud of is the 5-on-5 Survivor Series match I did for 2013, simply because of how many different things spawned out of it and how long its effects were relevant for. I'm not going to lie and say that all of those things were in my mind when I decided that I wanted to set up Swagger beating Big Show at Mania by having Big Show throwing Swagger off of the stage in December because Big Show was so heartbroken that he didn't earn a title match by being the winning captain at Survivor Series (pretty much everything pertaining to Big Show up through the 2015 Royal Rumble Title shot as a babyface I had planned in advance, aside from the Wyatt feud)... but if I hadn't decided that I wanted to do that and then asked myself "who will be on these teams" and then made an effort to make the eliminations relevant to the storylines going forward, I would never have gotten to so many of the different places I did and so many of the concepts, from big overall angles to small little details, and I think my booking would have been the lesser for it because that sort of ability to point to a plot point and trace it back from Z to Y to X all the way to A is, to me, the best of booking.

Survivor Series should be like CHIKARA's Cibernetico: either an important moment (almost always a blow-off) in one major angle, or it should be the start of a whole bunch of new angles, set in motion by this one intricately-booked match. WWE's attitude towards it (and ROH's towards Champions vs. All-Stars, and New Japan's towards the G1, too) seem to be as this thing that we've got to do because we always do and we've got to say it's a big deal and the action is guaranteed to be great, but when it comes to actually booking it they seem to treat it more like a burden than anything else and so they just throw it together with some focus on who wins but that's it. I think this is a HUGE mistake. I've actually found that things like this are pretty helpful in figuring out where you're going to go afterwards because they force you to make choices which a good booker will find a way to follow up on. That's why I've kept doing that "Champions Beat The Clock Challenge" gimmick in my fantasy booking leading into Night of Champions: Because it gives me groundwork to figure out what my cards for September and October should be. New Japan should be doing that with their singles title shots and the G1, and ROH should be doing it with Champions vs. All-Stars, and WWE should be doing it with Survivor Series.

As for the number of them, I think that with two major shows you need to have two 5-on-5s. Back when they had one roster I liked the idea of having one 5-on-5 as the big one but also doing a 4-on-4 lower down on the card. I think you also need to switch it up. Some years I'd have the teams come together naturally, some years I'd have two captains picking whoever they wanted, some years I'd have captains having to work to recruit teams, and some years I'd have the authority figure assign them. Whichever one your stories need is the one you do. Same goes for the idea of a special prize for winning (if you even need to have one).

cero2k wrote:i'd personally like to see stipulations where ALL the brand roster can get behind off. I always loved the Bragging rights PPV, i like this smackdown vs raw competition, check out this video from SS05, this is what i want from a raw vs smackdown feud

so what kind of stipulations could a whole brand get behind of?, that is the question. Maybe first pick at the draft if we move the draft after SS, maybe whoever wins gets the rights to the MITB match/PPV, maybe whoever wins gets the cruiserweight division, idk

First pick for winning Bragging Rights is a good idea. If they fix the draft as an annual thing, I'd like to see it work like the 2004 draft did where you only get a few picks. There is no need to go move a million guys around every year. The two best drafts IMO were 2004 and 2005 simply because they managed to make everyone who got drafted feel important because they could focus on them.The issue with doing Bragging Rights (and MITB, too, which is something I'm very interested in seeing how they handle) is that it needs to be a cross-branded show, and that would dilute the number of cross-branded shows. I'm not sure how many is the right number because you don't want to do them too often, but it also makes it harder to do something like Bragging Rights or an MITB PPV or King of the Ring if you want to keep the cross-branded shows down to just the Big Four. I think you could maybe do Bragging Rights as a short Network-exclusive show. Like maybe limit it to a one-hour 7-on-7 one-fall crazy-fest that is just that one match or something like that. Maybe you could make it two hours and add an undercard match from each show, but I wouldn't want it to feel too much like a normal PPV because you'd want the top guys from each brand in Bragging Rights rather than in their own separate matches.They clearly like doing Ladder Matches at Mania, so I wouldn't be shocked if they moved MITB back to Mania. It will be interesting to see how they handle the whole "which title can you challenge for?" thing. With the Royal Rumble they seemed to automatically assume that Orton is required to face the SD champion and the idea of him jumping to Raw like past winners was never even mentioned once.